Is GitHub down? › Outage history › Aug 26, 2026

GitHub outage on Aug 26, 2026: what happened

On Aug 26, 2026, the GitHub status page reported "Incident with Actions". About 2 hours 50 min: from Aug 26, 2026, 15:11 UTC to Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC, by the official start and resolution times.

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Started
Aug 26, 2026, 15:11 UTC
Resolved
Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC
Duration
2 hours 50 min
Official impact
Critical
Affected
Actions, Pages
Source
Incident with Actions on the GitHub status page

The GitHub status page rated it "Critical", its highest impact level: an outage of the affected parts, not only slowness.

What caused the GitHub outage?

"This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the service processing triggers for Actions workflows. The saturation was caused by growing daily peak load combined with an upstream issue in GitHub's event processing infrastructure, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/hcbtzksccj2f, which caused burst amplification of already-high load."

From the GitHub status page, Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC.

When was it fixed?

The GitHub status page marked it resolved at Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC, 2 hours 50 min after it started. A fix was in place and being monitored from Aug 26, 2026, 17:54 UTC. Its resolution note: "On August 26, 2026 from 15:02 to 15:45 UTC, Actions jobs failed to start. The following 2 hours until 17:40 UTC, Actions runs were delayed starting by more than 5 minutes as the system caught up with delayed load. This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the ..."

Timeline of official updates

Every update the GitHub status page posted, oldest first. Times are UTC.

  1. Aug 26, 2026, 15:11 UTC investigating

    We are investigating reports of degraded availability for Actions

  2. Aug 26, 2026, 15:12 UTC investigating

    Pages is experiencing degraded performance. We are continuing to investigate.

  3. Aug 26, 2026, 15:23 UTC investigating

    We've identified an issue with a database primary and are failing over to a replica immediately

  4. Aug 26, 2026, 15:48 UTC investigating

    primary failover briefly improved performance but did not fully mitigate, we've throttled inbound traffic and are investigating upstream Vitess issues

  5. Aug 26, 2026, 16:14 UTC investigating

    We believe we've identified and addressed the issue and are ramping traffic back up slowly to ensure it doesn't recur. Some customers will continue to see delays as we ramp up.

  6. Aug 26, 2026, 16:49 UTC investigating

    Pages is operating normally.

  7. Aug 26, 2026, 16:50 UTC investigating

    We are continuing to observe recovery and delayed queues are burning down. Some customers will continue to see increased delays until all throttled work has been completed - we expect this within the next hour.

  8. Aug 26, 2026, 17:32 UTC investigating

    We are continuing to observe recovery and expect actions inbound queues to be back to normal in <30min. Work will continue to flow through the system subject to per-customer concurrency limits.

  9. Aug 26, 2026, 17:54 UTC monitoring

    The degradation affecting Actions has been mitigated. We are monitoring to ensure stability.

  10. Aug 26, 2026, 18:00 UTC monitoring

    All inbound queues have recovered and Actions is operating as expected. 3.7% of jobs assigned to larger runners during the early stage of this incident are stuck waiting for runner assignment. Those will be canceled within the hour. Other runners are successfully processing all new jobs.

  11. Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC resolved

    On August 26, 2026 from 15:02 to 15:45 UTC, Actions jobs failed to start. The following 2 hours until 17:40 UTC, Actions runs were delayed starting by more than 5 minutes as the system caught up with delayed load. This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the service processing triggers for Actions workflows. The primary was failed over, but the system did not fully recover. The saturation was caused by growing daily peak load combined with an upstream issue in GitHub's event processing infrastructure, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/hcbtzksccj2f, which caused burst amplification of already-high load. Downstream throttles that were later used to recover were set ~10% too high to protect the system. At 15:45 UTC, throttling combined with service restarts recovered the service's core health. Those throttles were gradually raised between 15:54 and 17:22 to restore full webhook processing for Actions runs. This ramp was deliberately slow to ensure we did not re-overwhelm the system given our original throttling was now known to be incorrectly set. The queue of webhook events was fully burned down at 17:40 UTC. 3.7% of larger-runner jobs, along with some scale-set self-hosted jobs, remained stuck in queued or "waiting for runner" state. We deployed a change to force-revoke jobs in this state, and they transitioned to failed at 18:40 UTC, about 50 minutes after incident mitigation. Releasing these jobs also freed hosted concurrency for larger-runner jobs. Customers using concurrency groups saw longer impact due to a separate issue where runners assigned to a subset of jobs disconnected before the force-revoke mitigation was deployed, which prevented runner acquisition from progressing and left jobs in a waiting-for-runner state. This was resolved at 01:00 UTC on August 27. Some runs triggered during the 15:02-15:45 UTC incident window encountered a bug that left them showing as queued even after service recovery. In the backend, these runs had already failed and will automatically move to canceled state 24 hours after creation. As follow-up, we are fixing the root cause of this queued state and improving our ability to bulk-cancel affected runs. Several changes to improve the general scalability of this part of Actions were already complete and deploying to production. Rollout of those changes will be complete within the next 24 hours. Further work to improve scale, resiliency, and more graceful degradation of ...

GitHub outage questions

What caused the GitHub outage on Aug 26, 2026?

The GitHub status page said (update at Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC): "This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the service processing triggers for Actions workflows. The saturation was caused by growing daily peak load combined with an upstream issue in GitHub's event processing infrastructure, https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/hcbtzksccj2f, which caused burst amplification of already-high load."

When was the GitHub outage on Aug 26, 2026 fixed?

The GitHub status page marked it resolved at Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC, 2 hours 50 min after it started. A fix was in place and being monitored from Aug 26, 2026, 17:54 UTC. Its resolution note: "On August 26, 2026 from 15:02 to 15:45 UTC, Actions jobs failed to start. The following 2 hours until 17:40 UTC, Actions runs were delayed starting by more than 5 minutes as the system caught up with delayed load. This impact was triggered by saturation of writes to the database primary used by the ..."

How long did the GitHub outage last?

About 2 hours 50 min: from Aug 26, 2026, 15:11 UTC to Aug 26, 2026, 18:01 UTC, by the official start and resolution times.

Was GitHub completely down?

The GitHub status page rated it "Critical", its highest impact level: an outage of the affected parts, not only slowness. The affected parts listed were: Actions, Pages.

Which parts of GitHub were affected?

The GitHub status page listed: Actions, Pages.

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Quotes are the GitHub status page's own words, from the official incident. Is It Up or Down is independent and not affiliated with GitHub. Times are UTC.